Meme: Farmville

After resisting the furtive charms of Facebook for many years -- and not without several genuine attempts to make it work -- I think I have finally settled in to what I think might be somewhat normal use of that social thingy. Once again I'm proving that I'm stubbornly mainstream, or in the chasm crossing jargon, plopped at the tippy top of the "early majority" hilltop. Sadly, no matter how hard I try to be an early adopter (forget innovator!) it's just not in the cards.

So it should be no surprise that 55 million people happily playing Farmville would be my cue to check it out.  Apparently Farmville is the most popular game on Facebook, and was last year crowned the most popular game in the world. To be fair, I have been actively avoiding game playing, mainly because I get sucked in and misplace whole chunks of my life.  My university career was so packed with the Ultima series that I used to claim it as my second minor. But recently I've been working on something game-like on the interwebs for work and figured that to be an educated person I would have to try out Farmville.

Wow. That was last week.

Yeah, I played it a bunch and I feel a little obliged to give some kind of status report, mainly for any Facebook friends who have noticed weird things on my Facebook account. If you got a message from me requesting urgent help in fertilizing my pumpkins, sorry about that. Also, I think I've been suffering from some kind of intense social vertigo, so any of you who has had direct contact with me in the last week -- and I have no idea who you are -- again, apologies.

I started out with pretty innocent intentions. I got the app hooked up to my account and checked out the little farm they give you to start with. But pretty soon it was clear to me that the economy of this little Farmville world runs largely on social energy -- besides the cycles of crop growing and animal husbandry and crafting which produce some basic revenue to grow your farm, the real path to the farm of your dreams is through the recruitment of "neighbors" who must be Facebook friends. Capital is generated out of thin air, as long as you gift it away -- Farmville gives you a pile of giveable stuff and encourages a frenzy of sharing: you can give out tractor fuel, bricks and boards to make buildings, decorations and colletctibles, etc. It has a very weird economic logic that's eerily like the mechanics of the Federal Reserve.

Of course I was flummoxed at first. It turns out that of my 150+ Facebook friends, only a handful were playing Farmville.  Like, three. A few more had tried and abandoned it. With the exception of the Man-Cheetah, I couldn't bring myself to recruit people, even though the the game is hellbent to update your entire Facebook friend list with recruitment crap almost constantly.

So I threw myself at the mercy of newsgroups and wikis to see what might be done about the neighbor problem.  It turns out that there are message boards for people who are dying to be your Farmville neighbors, so after one fairly productive night of recruiting I had the following conversation with Kim at breakfast:

Her: Um, I noticed you have some, um, new friends on Facebook? Like about a hundred new ones?
Me: Yep..
Her: What can you tell me about the naked guy in the gold diaper?
Me: You don't like gold on diapers?
Her: I did like the picture of Maze and Lu you put up yesterday..
Me: OK, OK, I get your point..

So thus endeth the great Farmville experiment.

I unfriended the gold diaper guy, and the chick crawling across her kitchen table in a witch outfit, and the weightlifting Romanian twins who breed fighting dogs.. Since you can't actually delete a Farmville farm I closed down my bakery, sold my tractors and button collection and my fences, I ploughed up my crops and let everything run fallow. If you go there now all you see is a sign that says:  "This farm was sold to Shelbyville Manhattan. He has relocated to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001829152927." 

Hmmm.. I wonder what the new owner is going to do with the place?